


If you be my bodyguard

by glasscaskets



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Bittersweet, Character Study, F/M, Gen, Infinity Gems, Post-Endgame, Spoilers, Very Much Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 13:51:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18621925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glasscaskets/pseuds/glasscaskets
Summary: ...I can be your long-lost pal.Tony goes spinning in infinity, Amen and Hallelujah!(Slightly more spoiler-y summary inside.)





	If you be my bodyguard

**Author's Note:**

> While Tony is going reasonably gentle into that good night, each of the six stones rages (or, at any rate, flares) against the dying of the light.
> 
> So. A little bit “El milagro secreto,” a little bit of comic book magic, a little bit the 2010 Doctor Who finale. A little bit Paul Simon. Mostly because I love the phrase “spinning in infinity,” and it was pretty relevant. That summary up there is, obviously, taken from Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
> 
> Hover over text not in English to see translation.

> _He looks around, around,_  
>  he sees angels in the architecture,   
>  spinning in infinity  
>  he says, “Amen and Hallelujah!”
> 
> _If you'll be my bodyguard,  
>  I can be your long-lost pal._
> 
> _-_ Paul Simon, “You Can Call Me Al,”  _Graceland_

Someone was talking, but he couldn’t make it out. It didn’t sound too urgent, not a question or a reprimand, something along the lines of _go to bed_. Well, he wasn’t unused to that. Nor was it a wholly uninteresting proposition.

His vision was clouding badly, like a vignette photograph, shrinking. He couldn’t see Rhodey, but he knew Rhodey had been there a moment ago. Rhodey and—Christ, Peter. He got the damn kid home. That sweet kid, Christ how Tony loved him.

His blood felt like it was crackling—that couldn’t be right, but—not the suit. Not the suit, not anything but him. Up one arm. Somebody had told him it was okay. Okay.

Pepper was kissing his cheek. That was a thing he imagined, when he felt really like he might hit the hay and not get back up. Started back in Afghanistan, he’d sometimes half-daydream what she might feel like that close up. He’d thought about what Yinsin had said, about his lack of family, about his supposed loneliness. It’s hard to be lonely with a girl like her in the room, he’d thought, but the feeling ached a little anyways.

He remembers suddenly seeing her on the tarmac, thinking,  _I almost never told her_. 

So it’s possible Pepper isn’t really here. She wasn’t really in the cave (even if she really was on the tarmac). He’d dreamed her up in the emptiness with Nebula, many times. He told Nebula about her, and the poor old blue sour gal didn’t care, but she listened anyways, after a while. After he told her that if she lost the paper-flipping game he wasn’t going to scrap her for parts. The genuine surprise on her face broke some dam between them, and he’d told her about a lot of things. She’d told him some things too, in the ever-thinning air, and he couldn’t remember all of it, now, but he remembered curling his hand in a light fist, around an imaginary glass, toasting her with empty air and saying, “Well here’s to never living up to daddy’s expectations,” which was the kind of thing he said instead of _thank you_.

That was a long time ago, now. He’d told Pepper, back when she was pregnant, that he really hoped the baby didn’t ever think of him that way. _I don’t want it to be—Pep, listen, I don’t want it to be anything but whatever it wants to be. It doesn’t have to be like me. I don’t want it to be like me_.

She’s kissing him again, in that memory, as it slides away, and as he very distantly hears someone let out of a roar of pain or anger or distress. He tries to move, to see who it is, but the crackle of strange electricity flies up into him again, and all is dissolved into light and air and nothing at all.

He’s blinking at his father in a brightly-lit parking lot in New Jersey, eye-to-eye, and a second later, down tiny again, tilting his head up to Dad, and it’s not Camp Lehigh, it’s—he knows it by the smell alone, the power of the memory, his earliest and strongest memory of Howard, of Dad, it’s Flushing, it’s Stark Expo ’74, and Howard pats his head distractedly and shuffles him towards Jarvis, who picks up his hand and offers him a lemonade.

It’s gone as soon as it’s there, the set and actors changed around him, and he catches a glimpse of Steve, jaw set, the poor stranded kid that can do this all day, the man ten years later, _that is America’s ass,_ God love him, and Tony hopes the kid gets a rest. If anyone deserves it—

He takes a breath and he’s floating between two versions of himself in his old tower in Manhattan, the hole in the sky seamed behind him in and everything coming together like clouds before a hurricane, and not a one of them can see where they’re hurtling, and he leaves himself perched there between people and times, thinks _good luck_ as everything crackles and fades.

He skitters off a glittering city, thinks he can hear a familiar voice far off. A strange metallic whistle and something flies past or through or over or around him, block and handle, a _hammer_. The voice goes triumphant. There’s life in it, yet.

 He catches a glimpse of grey, smells something burning, and hears a far more familiar voice—something about flying spikes—and the warmth that voice carries burrows up inside of him, rockets him to a dorm room with the muffled sounds of Tears for Fears floating from another room, the smell of laundry done infrequently and the slightly burnt smell Rhodey’s crappy old Mr. Coffee, _Rhodey_ —

“—supposed to go to that RA meeting for lunch but after we could go hang out in Dr. Murphy’s lab for a bit.”

The coffee machine always burnt the coffee a bit. Tony caused a small fire trying to improve it and he’d been so sure Rhodey would go ballistic but instead he’d laughed his ass off and told Tony he’d singed his eyebrows.

Rhodey is there, in a purple polo and impossibly young, waiting for a response from someone Tony had been a long time ago. Tony thinks,  _I love you_ , and then he blinks and he’s back in an expanse of damp grey, where Rhodey—older now, encased in armor, that lighter self of RAs and Dr. Murphy’s lab buried far inside him now—is talking to Nebula. “I wasn’t always like this,” she tells him.

“Neither was I,” Rhodey replies, and Tony is swallowed by the sound of their boots in the water.

The crackle is overtaking his body now, throwing him from nowhere to nowhere, a shadow of particles, a chemical notion, and he thinks he can hear Bruce’s voice, dear wonderful Brue, for a moment—talking to someone, not him, about time and second chances, or perhaps many millions of chances—he remembers like a dream Strange’s single finger extended to him, the realization of what he must do—and he is catching the wave of—

 _Oh_.

Brilliant.

It’s time.

 _Can I see Morgan?_ he thinks, and for an instance he smells her, her dark hair pressed his nose, his cheek the crown of her head, her cheek pressed to his shoulder, her body melting into his as if they were the same thing, as if they were marble no one had yet chipped into shapes.

Then he was suspended—in his suit?—in the air, between a jagged crop of rocks and a slender body that had just slammed into his.

“This has got to be a death dream,” says the body.

Oh. One left.

“Agent Romanov. Miss me?”

He can see her face now, and it isn’t like Rhodey’s or his father’s, smudged with time and memory, it isn’t like Bruce’s and Thor’s, distant like static on a damaged radio. She’s right in front of him, herself, just as he’d last seen her, her braid slid over her shoulder and the very slight remain of a tear caught under her eye.

She smiles at him, and it isn’t Natalie Rushman’s smile, or Agent Romanov’s, either. It isn’t coy or constructed. It isn’t the woman he’d seen on television after SHIELD collapsed, playing chess master, or the coifed posed perfection of a Red Room graduate or an Avenger. It isn’t affected, it isn’t made. It’s just Natasha.

She smiles at him. It’s radiant.

“You’re cheating, aren’t you?” she says. “This isn’t real.”

“I think it’s real for the moment,” he replies.

She nods a bit, lets her eyes train up, where Tony can make out a great and gruesome height.

“I’m scared he won’t forgive me,” she whispers, dipping her head back to his, so their cheeks brush against one another on her way to his ear.

Clint. He hadn’t told them much about how the stone came back but Natasha didn’t, but Tony had gathered the basics. Unlike the rest, he’d had a preview. He should have thought of it. The stone for a person you love. Gamora, Natasha. Nebula told him about Gamora. Natasha had let him find her bit by bit. Young girls of steel, who forged compassion without anyone to show them how. Lethal, with their never quite right smiles, their childhoods eaten by unseeing machines. How incredibly they loved, with that fire that they’d taught themselves.

“You’re the best of us,” he told her.

He straightened her neck, hoisted herself slightly on his hovering body—he could barely feel her weight—to look him in the eye.

“I’m not,” she said, and he could see her so clearly, knew she was talking to him with the kind of honesty, the kind of ease, she’d so rarely been afforded in life. _Did she have any family? Yes. Us._ She made him think of animals that walk across glaciers or deserts for their food or their young, of ancient tortoises, the last of their kind, of flowers that grew through pavement.

“You’re the very best of us,” he says again,  _us_ , the Avengers, _us_ , the wretched little world. He feels the crackle inside of him again. She frowns a tiny bit, like she felt it too.

“Are you scared?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says. “You?”

“No,” she says, and he believes her. She smiles at him again, that small smile, that incredible smile that speaks failure and forgiveness and a strange sense of warmth that seems to radiate from inside of them both.

“It looks like this is the end,” he tells her. He knows, now, understands with incredible force and specify: _I am dying._ It’s a thought he’s had many times before, but this time it’s different. There’s no urgency, no question. Curtain dropping, dropping, dropping.

“Fallaces sunt rerum species,” she tells him, warmly.

           

**Author's Note:**

> ...“Fallaces sunt rerum species” is, of course, what Nat says to Tony in _Iron Man 2_ when he accuses her of not really speaking Latin.
> 
> I might expand this somewhat, but for now, I teared up writing it in a Starbucks that has a three-star rating on Yelp. 
> 
> I have a massively neglected [tumblr](https://glasscaskets.tumblr.com).


End file.
